the Story of God: Acts I & II

We have all but forgotten our story. The disillusionment of modernism and the emergence of postmodernism has led to a rejection of storylines and meta-narratives. It comes as no surprise that the monotheistic religions of Judaism, Islam, and Christianity (all of which are founded upon overarching storylines) have fallen out of vogue in the western world to be replaced with a new obsession with New Ageism and Eastern religions which deemphasize storylines and exalt a cyclical and transient understanding of the world. The message of the gospel is that history is going somewhere, and Christianity has its own framework, or meta-narrative, for understanding the world. The proclamation of the gospel is precisely the proclamation of this story, but many Christians retain, at best, a foggy understanding of this story.

The basic understanding of Christianity goes something like this: “We are sinners and we need to be saved, so God sent Jesus to die on the cross for our sins so that we won’t go to hell when we die.” An understanding of the Christian story is necessary for Christians for no less than two reasons: (1) by understanding the story, we can effectively proclaim it; and (b) by understanding the story, we can make more sense of Christian teachings. Perhaps one of the reasons many Christians struggle to grasp the “ins-and-outs” of such teachings as justification, sanctification, redemption, etc. is because these teachings have been reduced to being parts of a systematic theology. They have a certain “textbook feel” that detaches them from our real, run-of-the-mill lives. The Story of God, as I’m presenting it here, can be seen in seven stages.

Before plunging into the story, however, a note on these “seven stages” is in order. A popular understanding of the “Christian story” is dispensationalism, the idea that biblical history is divided into seven self-contained dispensations, which are ways that God works out his purposes. When one dispensation is exhausted, a new one begins. Dispensationalism is erroneous for a variety of reasons, and the “Story of God” presented here should not be confused with dispensationalism. While dispensationalism obsesses over so-called dispensations, the story presented here obsesses over biblical covenants. The story of God is essentially the story of the Creator God making covenants with a wayward people and faithfully executing those covenants. These covenants throughout history build upon one another, culminating in the New Covenant in Jesus Christ. There are no dispensations but, rather, the Creator God working through history and with fallen man to execute his purposes and to bring healing to a broken world.

The Christian story is, at its heart, a story of rescue and renewal, and the main actor in this drama is a God who cares about his world, his creation, and especially his image-bearing creatures. Against the pantheistic notion of God, the Judeo-Christian God is set over against creation, rules over creation, and is intimately involved with his creation while remaining other-than-it. Against the deistic view of God, the Judeo-Christian God cares deeply about his creation and is actively at work within it; he isn’t distant nor remote but so close that at times it seems like the veil between heaven and earth is paper-thin.

This God’s ultimate concern isn’t our happiness and contentment, nor the flowering of our selfish pursuits and the realization of our silly dreams; rather, his ultimate concern is the blossoming of his own loving pursuits and the coming-to-birth of his own glorious dreams: in short, the full consummation of his kingdom. God’s care for human beings isn’t simply about having a sacred romance with us, or filling a void in our lives, or making our hearts flutter whenever we think about him. His desire is that we become the people he created us to be (his fully flourishing image-bearers) and that we co-labor with him in his dream for the world. His great love and care for us is far richer and marvelous than we mere creatures can envisage. This God created a beautiful and good world, and evil marred it. The Bible accounts for both the goodness of God’s world (Genesis 1-2) and for its corruption (Genesis 3). The story doesn’t stop there, however: in a move radically different than we find with any pantheistic or deistic perspectives of God, the Judeo-Christian God is doing something about it.

The Judeo-Christian God has several names throughout the Old Testament, but the name he gives himself is the key to understanding just who he is. When God called the pseudo-Egyptian refugee prince Moses to confront Pharaoh and demand that he let the enslaved Israelites go, Moses asked him, “Who shall I say sent me?” God gave himself a name: “I Am Who I Am” or “I Will Be Who I Will Be.” Because the Jewish people so revered the name of God, they referred to Him as “He Who Is”. The Hebrew language of the ancient Israelites uses only consonants, so no one really knows how God’s self-revealed name is actually pronounced. The consonants for “He Who Is” (Y, H, W, and H again) lend to a best guess that his name was pronounced “Yahweh”. Strict orthodox Jews still refuse to speak his name even to this day, referring to him as “The Name.” Some won’t even write his name, writing “God” as “G-d”. In order to prevent God’s name from being pronounced, later Israelites infused the consonants of YHWH with the Hebrew “Adonai” (meaning Lord, Master, or King). When the name of God (YHWH) came about in their texts, if they were reading it out loud, they would read “Adonai.” Modern translations often interpret this mingling of the two names as “LORD” in all caps. Modern-day readers and interpreters have often taken this infusion and turned it into yet another name for God, the result being “Jehovah.” No ancient Israelite, however, would have been familiar with that pronunciation.

All this aside, the name God gives himself is identified with what he does, and his character is to be defined by his activities. Through the Exodus God showed that he is a God who hears the cries of his people and frees them from slavery. He is a deliverer, he is a rescuer. He is also a God who is faithful to his promises: he promised Abraham that, after a time of enslavement, he would lead Abraham’s descendants out of slavery and into the Promised Land. YHWH is a God who keeps his promises and remains faithful to his covenants; indeed, “the righteousness of God” can adequately be understood precisely as his faithfulness to his promises. Deliverance and rescue is what the Judeo-Christian God is all about, and thus the story of his dealings with his world can be seen in the light of his great desire to rescue it from the predicament in which it finds itself.

~ Act I: Creation ~

In Deuteronomy 6.4 we find the classic Jewish refrain, the Shema: Hear, O Israel: YHWH our God, YHWH is one. By the time of Moses, the foundation of Jewish monotheism had been laid, but until the days of Isaiah, this declaration of the Oneness of YHWH worked itself out in a variety of ways. Some Jews clung to henotheistic polytheism, the worship of one god—in their case, YHWH—while acknowledging the existence of others. Monarchial polytheism developed somewhat later; this is the idea that other multiple gods exist but YHWH is the supreme god who rules over them.  Not until the days of the prophet Isaiah did monotheism solidify itself in Jewish thought. God speaks through his prophet, declaring, I am YHWH, and there is no other; apart from me there is no god. (Isa 45.5) The Jewish people came to believe that there was only one God, their God, and that all other gods were shams, mockeries, parodies, or lies. The Apostle Paul, fitting snugly into Jewish monotheism (though reworking it around Jesus) quotes the Shema in his letter to the Corinthians: We know that ‘an idol has no real existence,’ and that ‘there is no God but one.’ For although there may be so-called gods in heaven or on earth—as indeed there are many ‘gods’ and many ‘lords’—yet for us there is one God, the Father, from whom are all things and for whom we exist, and one Lord, Jesus Christ, through whom are all things and through whom we exist. (1 Cor 8.4b-6) Woven into the fabric of Jewish monotheism is the conviction that the one God, YHWH, is Creator, the one ‘from whom are all things’. Pantheism ran amuck in the ancient cultures in the Old and New Testaments, and the Jews came as a breath of fresh (albeit odd) air, declaring that within creation there was no divinity, that all of nature was a creation of their God, and that creation remained separate from him.

Classic Jewish monotheism stood upon two pillars: the beliefs that (a) there is one God, who created the entire cosmos, and who remained in an intimate relationship while remaining distinct from it, and (b) this God called Israel to be his special people. The Creator chose Israel; but why? Why did he elect the Jews? (As an aside, the whole issue of election is born not of the Reformers but of the Jews’ own wrestling with their God-given vocation and chosenness). In order to answer the question of why God chose Israel, we must look at the first Act of the story: the birthing of God’s world.

God’s creation of the world is laid out in Genesis 1-2. These accounts are difficult to interpret, and scholars from all branches of Judaism and Christianity disagree on the manner of interpretation to the point of name-calling and finger-pointing. These texts are chocked full of symbolism, polemic, and apologetic; sifting through all this in an attempt to reconstruct precisely how God did it, what it was like when he did it, and how long he took to do it, is like trying to take a family photograph in a house of mirrors while blindfolded, deaf, and dumb. Sidestepping critical issues, what can we know about God, his creation, and mankind from these creation texts, always bearing in mind that Genesis 1-2 aren’t the only creation texts in the Bible (Job 38-41 stands as its own sort of ‘creation text’)?

First, What can we know about God?  We can know he is powerful. God has the power to create something out of nothing. We can know he is creative. Not only does God create, but He creates creatively. Second, What can we know about God’s creation?  This is an interesting question, because the world we currently inhabit is spoiled and marred by evil, and the current creation is but a weak shadow of the original. Even in all its beauty, the world we currently live in (a world of great deserts and thick jungles, a world of Siberian snows and deciduous forests, a world full of strange creatures like giant squids and anacondas and duck-billed platypuses) is just an echo, perhaps even a mirage, of what God originally created. Perceiving the beauty of the cosmos, and acknowledging the great mysteries that abound not only in the most distant solar systems but in our own deepest seas, we know that God delights in beauty, in strange things, in both comedy and mystery. He created the stupid ostrich, the bloated behemoth, and the terrifying Leviathan.

Scripture tells us that God created his world and declared it to be “very good”. Thus we know his creation is ‘good,’ but we must define what ‘good’ does and does not mean. ‘Good’ does not mean ‘perfect’ in the Greek sense of unchanging. Nor does it mean that God’s creation is always aesthetically pleasing; God delights in mosquitoes just as much as he delights in bunnies, and he finds pleasure in hammerhead sharks just as much as he finds joy in bottlenose dolphins. ‘Good’ means, quite simply, that God finds pleasure and beauty in his creation, even if our own aesthetic senses do not. One might ask, Were there thorns and thistles in God’s original creation? and What about tornadoes, tsunamis, hurricanes, and forest fires?  While we may not like thorns and thistles because they hurt, and while we fear natural disasters due to our vulnerabilities in being chained to an eventual physical death, these things are natural and not the enemy. Death is the enemy of mankind, not that which may bring death knocking on our front door. The curse regarding thorns and thistles in Genesis 3 is not that thorns and thistles become part of the landscape but that mankind would now have to wrestle with them in order to make a living (Gen 3.17-19). Nor is transience, such as the changing of the seasons, evil; winter is no less pleasing to God than spring or summer. All of these are parts of God’s good creation.

A pertinent question is raised: Was there death in God’s good creation before evil entered the world? I believe the answer is Yes. A critical reading of Genesis 1-3 reveals that in the original, unspoiled creation, both death and pain were present. One of the curses upon women was that the pains of childbirth would be increased (Gen 3.16); thus there must have already been some measure of pain. As any mathematician will tell you, an increase of Zero to the greatest magnitude will still give you Zero. Pain is a good thing, an invaluable part of God’s original creation, and it is due to the curse that pain has increased, not merely come into existence. We perceive pain as evil because it hurts us and we don’t like it. But is it actually evil? No. The same can be said of death. Death (in the nonhuman created order) was part of the original creation. The violence and brutality within nature frightens us, and so we deem it to be evil. We’re bothered by the scenes of orcas attacking baby seals, and we’re uncomfortable when cute bunnies are suffocated by pythons. In Job, God says that he is the one who created the lion, and he provides their food (Job 38.39). God’s ordering of his universe includes death being critical to the “circle of life”, and sometimes this “circle of life” isn’t aesthetically pleasing. But that does not make it evil. However, when we look at death in reference to human beings, things take on a different contour. Because of mankind’s rebellion in Genesis 3, death now enslaves mankind. Human beings are now subjected to that entity which had been limited to everything but them in the plant and animal kingdoms.

Genesis 1-2 tells us that God created the universe, and within that universe he created galaxies. Within one of those galaxies he created a solar system, and in that solar system he created a very strange planet. He filled that planet with all manners of life; top-to-bottom he filled it, from the oceans to the land masses to the skies; and on this planet, in the midst of a wild world filled with dangers, mysteries, surprises, and adventures, he created a garden. Within this garden he created Adam and Eve. This Garden rivaled any of the most popular destination spots in the tropical hemispheres; forget Maui, Cancun, or Montego Bay. After creating entire worlds and ecosystems within planet earth, God said, Let us make man in our image, in our likeness, and let them rule over the fish of the sea and the birds of the air, over the livestock, over all the earth, and over all the creatures that move along the ground. (Gen 1.26-27)

The pluralistic language of God’s decision (“Let us make man…”) has led some to wonder, “Who is God talking to?” Recent advocates of the “Alien Hypothesis”, the idea that ancient aliens created mankind and that mankind perceived these aliens as divine, point to this text as evidence that there was some collaboration between multiple entities involved with the creation of mankind. Over against this, orthodox Christians point to Trinitarian theology. Trinitarian theology, however, was unknown to Moses (or whoever wrote the Book of Genesis), and recent studies into the ancient world have discovered that such pluralistic language doesn’t demand the existence of multiple entities. Ancient kings and emperors would often speculate to themselves in such a manner. The pluralistic nature of God’s statement is representative of such an event: God, being One, speculates to himself and declares to himself his agenda. God spelled out his agenda: to create man in his own image, male and female.

From this agenda we can deduce mankind’s identity and purpose. God created mankind to be his image-bearers. In Latin, mankind is the Imago Dei, the “image of God.” Many assume this means we are endowed with characteristics similar to God: feelings, emotions, creativity, and choice. Animals, however, who are not made in the Imago Dei, can experience feelings and emotions and can exercise creativity. A recent book advocated that we are made in the Imago Dei, male and female, in the sense that men tend to be warriors and adventurers whereas women tend to be nurturers and caretakers. I understand why these understandings of mankind in the Imago Dei make sense, but I don’t think that’s what it means to be made in God’s image. The language itself, “image of God”, is taken straight from ancient Near Eastern culture: an “image” of something was believed to carry the authority of the image it bore. Ancient rulers of the Near East, when conquering foreign lands, would set up their “images” in that land as testaments to their authority and ruler-ship. The ambassadors and emissaries of these kings would be considered to be “in the image of their king,” in the sense that they carried his authority and rule into places where he was not directly involved. Fast-forward to the Romans, and we find them renown for carrying their standards, or images, into battle; these standards symbolized the power, weight, and might of Rome going forth against the pagan hordes, carrying the torch of Rome’s claims of justice and peace into alien territories. When Genesis says man is made in the Imago Dei, the point is the same: mankind, as God’s image-bearers, are the ones endowed with God’s creative power and authority, to go forth into the world and to rule over it as God’s representatives to all creation. The title “image of God” speaks not of something intrinsic to our nature but to our God-ordained mission and purpose. Ultimately, human beings are created to advance God’s rule and authority into his good creation.

So God created a universe over which he ruled, and he created mankind to be his royal ambassadors and emissaries, and he tasked mankind with the mission of going forth into the wild creation and subduing it. This isn’t a subduing of exploitation but a subduing by cultivation. Mankind was to leave the Garden and go about subduing all creation to the glory of God, to “carry his torch,” so-to-speak, and tame the wild creation, expanding the Garden of Eden into the rest of the cosmos. Before mankind even leaves the Garden, however, things went horribly awry.

~ Act II: The Fall ~

The biblical account of The Fall is found in Genesis 3, where we find strange language about a Tree of the Knowledge of Good & Evil and a talking snake and shame of nakedness. Like Genesis 1-2, peeling through the layers of symbolism, veiled meaning, metaphor, polemic, and apologetic is tricky business. At the heart of this story is the temptation presented to mankind: “Become like God!” (Gen 3.4) This temptation to “become like God” lies at the heart of rebellion, the heart of idolatry. God’s image-bearers decided that rather than bearing their Creator’s image, they would bear their own. The result was expulsion from the Garden and becoming not “like God” but “like the animals,” subject to decay and death. This great act of rebellion, this first act of idolatry, when man decided to serve himself rather than his Creator, to be his own king and master rather than an agent of God’s kingdom, is the moment when evil plunged into all of creation.

Our first question is often, How did evil infect God’s good creation? but a prior question must be asked: What, exactly, IS evil? We must distinguish between genuine evil and apparent evil. There are things that may appear to us to be evil but which are not evil at all. Pain and death within the created order (exempting mankind) were covered in the previous Act. Just because something is aesthetically unpleasing doesn’t mean it’s evil. This isn’t to say, of course, that there is no such thing as evil. Genuine evil does exist, and it seems to prosper. Theologians have spoken of evil in all sorts of categories, the prominent ones as of late being moral evil (that which is rebellion against God) and natural evil (the evil we find in earthquakes, tsunamis, and tornadoes). Categorizing evil can be a tricky game, and why are we to assume that natural events that affect us negatively are necessarily evil? Suffice it to say, evil is real, it causes pain, and it can be seen all over our world, from liars to genocidal megalomaniacs, from those who bully their peers on the playground to those who exterminate entire people groups. Evil can’t be reduced simply to “things that we do,” nor can it be reduced to mere “aspects of the heart.” Evil is both inward and outward. Injustice is done to the reality of evil by exterminating any supra-spiritual connections; an equal injustice is committed by centering evil upon “Satan” and “his minions,” making everything evil demonic by default. Evil is real, and though we may not be able to define it to a “T”, its affects are still felt in our world, on a global, communal, local, and individual scale. Like porn, we may not be able to define it, but we know it when we see it.

The Apostle Paul said, For the creation was subjected to futility, not willingly, but because of him who subjected it, in hope that the creation itself will be set free from its bondage to corruption and obtain the freedom of the glory of the children of God. (Rom 8.20-21) The Judeo-Christian worldview adheres to the belief that creation itself was affected by the curse due to mankind’s rebellion in the Garden. At the Fall, evil rippled throughout the entire universe. Like gangrene spreading through wounded flesh, evil spread throughout the created order, affecting everything from the subatomic level to the organization of galaxy clusters. As Paul said, creation will be set free from its bondage to corruption: it will be set free from the effects of evil set upon it. This liberation isn’t a present reality but a future one. Creation is presently in bondage, bulging against the chains of that bondage, sweating and huffing and puffing and crying out for deliverance; as St. Paul put it, We know that the whole creation has been groaning together in the pains of childbirth until now. (Rom 8.22) The created world in which we live, while resplendent with great beauties and adventures and mysteries, is but a shadow of the original, and a day is coming when the Creator God will renew and restore creation to its rightful intended status. But we are getting ahead of ourselves; that’s not until Act Six.

Mankind’s rebellion in the garden set off a dynamite explosion that created an avalanche of ever-increasing evil within human beings themselves. The original “sin,” that first act of idolatry, set off a chain-reaction that rivals anything experienced in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Evil infected human beings, not just in the things that we do (as if legalism could purge us of evil); nor did evil affect us just by the corruption of our minds (as if philosophy or psycho-babble could cure us). Evil infected our minds, and evil is seen in what we do; evil has infected our behaviors, our actions, our thoughts, our feelings, our dispositions, motivations, and inclinations. Evil has infected us in our hearts, in our spirits, in the core of our beings. The Apostle Paul says that we are enslaved to sin and even indwelt by sin in Romans 6-7. Because of our rebellion, we are infected by evil to our cores, and we are unable (and unwilling) to serve God as his image-bearers.

God created us to be his image-bearers, but we have become our own image-bearers. God created us to advance his kingdom and agenda, but we seek to advance our own kingdoms and agendas. God created us as humans, and in the forsaking of our identities as image-bearers, we have slipped into subhuman status. We are still Homo sapiens, and we’re still endowed with the “tools” God gave us to do his will, but now we use those tools in coercion and manipulation to have our own ways rather than God’s ways. We have become subhuman, or dehumanized, because we are failing to live as we were created to live.

The eight chapters of Genesis following the account of the Fall showcase how sin’s effects within man escalates. First there is escalation into murder, followed by a strange account of Nephilim and “sons of God” where the thrust of the story focuses on the degradation of women and their subjection to man’s sensual pleasures. In Genesis 6 we find the double-statement regarding the widespread rippling of evil and its affects on the world: YHWH saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every intention of the thoughts of men’s hearts were evil, evil, evil! and The earth was corrupt in God’s sight, and the earth was filled with violence. And God saw the earth, and behold, it was corrupt, for all flesh had corrupted their way on earth. (Gen 6.5, 11-12) Genesis 6-10 recounts the story of the Flood: God regretted creating mankind and decided to wipe them out, but his love for mankind won out and he landed on a different approach in dealing with the problem (an approach launched in Genesis 12, beginning with Act 3). The whole series of the wretchedness, wickedness, and evil of the world comes to a head in Genesis 11, the story of the Tower of Babel: all the evil people come together to build a tower that reaches into heaven, for the sole purposes of exalting themselves over all creation. In a word, they hoped to usurp YHWH from his throne. The story ends with God quite literally confusing their efforts, and they fail to accomplish their goals. The Tower of Babel symbolizes what has already become a reality in men’s hearts: they love themselves rather than God, and they’re devoted to their kingdoms rather than his.

The end of Genesis 11 finds the world embroiled in a sour mess. Evil courses through the veins of every living human being, and the creation itself is spoiled. God is angry, upset, and saddened by the state of things, and he decides to launch a rescue operation. He will deal with the evil infecting creation, not least the evil infecting his image-bearing creatures whom he loves. He will renew the entire cosmos, he will flood the world with peace and justice. In a world that has become a wasteland, God will act and return it to its rightful place of beauty. He will do this not with a simple declaration or a snap of his fingers, but through a very peculiar people: the descendants of a desert pagan who had a wife with a barren womb and failed hopes for sons to carry on his legacy.